Justified as natural order subjects obedience to a king; family as divinely sanctioned social order, basis of stability  at least in theory.

Widows legally "feme sole" (single woman).

Family as economic unit, women essential skills  resource management, use of time.

Poem New Hampshire woman 1782:

Up in the morning I must rise

Before Ive time to rub my eyes.

With half-pind gown, unbuckled shoe,

I haste to milk my lowing cow.

But, Oh! It makes my heart to ache,

I have no bread til I can bake.

And then, alas! It makes me sputter,

For I must churn or have no butter.

The hogs with swill too I must serve,

For hogs must eat or men will starve.

division of labor not straightforward - men made cider, women beer; men chop wood, women make soap; some jobs gender-neutral - weaving, milking cows, carrying water

picked up husbands craft, then took over business if widowed;

Elizabeth Holt publication New York Journal, states official printer during Revolution.

Anne Franklin and daughters ran printing business for Rhode Island;

1733 widows letter protesting exclusion from male-only business gatherings: "We are House keepers, Pay our Taxes, Carry on Trade, and most of us are she Merchants, and as we in some measure contribute to the Support of Government, we ought to be Intitled to some of the Sweets of it."

Nantucket whaling

Salem witch trials:

Europe: Malleus Maleficarum ("the Witches' Hammer") Dominican monks 1484: women's inferior minds made them "more credulous, and since the chief aim of the devil is to corrupt faith, therefore he attacks them. Women are naturally more impressionable, and more ready to receive the influence of a disembodied spirit."

1500s & 1600s "the great witch craze";

(hundred thousand at least; some historians say millions)

Popes special officials in Germany, executing two witches per day average.

1595 Spanish government warrant making elderly women prime suspects in cases of sorcery.

St Paul, "let your women keep silent in the churches; for it is not permitted unto them to speak."

radical nonconformist Protestant sects,

Anne Hutchinson, (1591-1643)

1636 called before alarmed ministers  accused of "a thing not tolerable or comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex you have stepped out of your place, you have rather been a husband than a wife, and a preacher rather than a hearer, and a magistrate rather than a subject."